Opera composer Carlisle Floyd, 87, pictured March 20, 2014 in the lobby of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center.

Opera composer Carlisle Floyd, 87, pictured March 20, 2014 in the...

One of the most common complaints about operas, both classic and contemporary, doesn't have anything to do with the music. It's the libretto — whether diffuse, wordy, elliptical or downright nonsensical — that people often have problems with.

Composer Carlisle Floyd, at 88 one of the living masters of contemporary American opera, is right there with them.

“I firmly believe that more operas are killed by bad librettos than by anything else,” he says. “I don't think even a great composer can overcome a bad libretto.”

His own librettos

Floyd’s solution to this problem is simplicity itself: He writes his own librettos. He always has, ever since his first major opera, “Susannah” — which opens at the San Francisco Opera on Saturday night — took the stage in 1955.

So an operatic conversation with Floyd tends to be as much about the words and the drama as it is about music. In fact, he attributes the success of “Susannah,” which has spent more than half a century as one of the most frequently performed works in the American repertoire, to the strength of the libretto.

The work’s premise has the conceptual simplicity of a Hollywood movie pitch. Floyd took the tale of Susannah and the Elders from the biblical Apocrypha (a subject that had been treated by Handel in an oratorio) and transferred it to rural Tennessee. The story of lust and hypocrisy fit all too well into the world of small-town life and revival meetings that Floyd knew from his South Carolina upbringing, and the score is steeped in the melodies and harmonic textures of the American South.

Since then, Floyd has gone on to create a string of strong-voiced but less well-known operas over the course of his career, mostly on American themes. They include operatic treatments of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King's Men,” and Olive Ann Burns’ 1984 novel “Cold Sassy Tree,” as well as a lone non-American subject, his version of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”

Yet the coming production, with soprano Patricia Racette in the title role, marks the first time that any of Floyd’s operas has been mounted during the company’s main season (“Susannah” was done as part of Spring Opera in 1964, and “Of Mice and Men” in 1974). It's not his favorite of his own creations — that would be “Cold Sassy Tree,” which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 2000 with Racette in a lead role — but, he says, it works.

'Scene to scene’

“The piece works from scene to scene because I was able to do a decent libretto. Placing it in the context of a summer revival meeting was the first thing that came to me, and it means it’s not an everyday situation. Those revivals are something people would wait for all year. I’d seen that when I was growing up, so I knew I was on solid ground.”

“Susannah” was also the impetus for his close friendship with General Director David Gockley, which dates to the early 1970s. The two men found themselves in Houston together — Floyd for a residency at the university and Gockley to take the helm of the opera company — and Gockley, who knew Floyd’s work primarily through “Susannah,” proposed a commission for the American bicentennial.

“A number of other companies had come to me about this,” Floyd recalls. “When I think about it now, it seems surprising that I went with Houston. The city was a backwater then; the golden years of Gockley had not yet begun. But there was something about him — he was so serious and so earnest, albeit very young — that I said, 'Yeah, I'll do that.’”

That commission became “Bilby's Doll,” a tale of religious mysticism set in Puritan Massachusetts, and Gockley went on to commission three more operas from Floyd. They also worked together to establish the Houston Opera Studio, the company's training program.

Although Floyd has spent long periods in Houston, his home base remains Tallahassee, Fla., where he spent decades on the music faculty at Florida State University. Part of his curriculum for budding opera composers, naturally, has been learning to write librettos — not with the expectation that they’ll end up doing it professionally, he says, but just so they understand what goes into a good libretto.

Floyd himself began as a creative writing major in college, so writing words came naturally to him. He began composing later, with an exclusive eye to the operatic stage.

“I always considered myself a theatrical composer — I’ve never been interested in writing symphonies and string quartets. I like to work with the written word and with drama, and I'm never happier than when I’m in a theater. I always advise my students that unless they find that collaborative experience exciting, they shouldn't go into it.”

Floyd is retired from teaching, but he continues to compose. This is, he says, the healthiest time he’s witnessed for contemporary music.

“The unhealthiest was in the 1960s and ’70s when music became so doctrinaire. The only thing that didn't get to was opera, because that was not their metier. But the climate now is very hospitable for all kinds of music.”

Chamber opera

Floyd is in the process of completing a chamber opera for a Houston premiere in 2016. It's based on “Compleat Female Stage Beauty,” a play by Jeffrey Hatcher about theatrical players in Restoration England, which became a 2004 film starring Billy Crudup and Claire Danes. And yes, he wrote the libretto.

“I think in some ways the new score is more conservative than any of them. I was 28 when I wrote 'Susannah,’ and I would feel very bad if I felt I did the exact same thing at 88. But I hope it’s recognizably me, and I think it is.”

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. E-mail: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman